Akbar to 81

This was an interesting weekend as this time of year we celebrate the combined birthdays of my wife's father and my daughter, since their birthdays are only a couple of days apart. Before leaving for Wilmington, we started the weekend off by seeing the newest Indian movie called Jodhaa Akbar. Indian movies are so fascinating to me as they always seem to have an interesting point or are pure entertainment without bad language or sexual content. This was a movie of epic proportions - I am so thankful to have a wife who enjoys going with me as that makes it even more enjoyable.

I don't know what happened on the drive down to the beach city of Wilmington as I slept almost all of the way. Happily I was not driving! Once we arrived, my daughter was treated like royalty as usual. I think that is why she wants to stay longer when it is time to return. We had a few laughs over presents and times of reminiscing of life in South Korea for the Dietrick family. Then the subject of computers came up of which I quickly become the family expert. In the morning I tried to fix my wife's father's five year old laptop.

He was complaining about how slow it was and how he had no disk space left. I first looked at his Recycle Bin and noticed it was almost 1 GB. When I looked at the contents I saw it had never been empty since 2002 when he bought it. I am still amazed at how unintuitive computers can be to someone's who career is not working with them. After running Disk Cleanup, and cleaning up the trash can, the space was still not coming back. I then found a utility called Folder Size, and it pointed me right to the problem of 6 GB of temporary files on main windows folder. Then I found out that with all of the programs installed recently the disk was badly fragmented. When I checked Windows Task Manager, I found out that 400 MB of memory was allocated but only 204 MB of memory was installed. We went out trying to find matching memory and after visiting every store we could find we had nothing to show for it. In the last store the man was so helpful that he said we could substitute other memory for the one I was looking for, but they were out. We went back to the next to last store that we had visited and found another person to help us. He located memory we needed and once back home it actually worked! In the end, he had a computer with 7 GB more free and 640 MB of memory and a laptop he could actually use! This was my birthday present for him and it was greatly appreciated by the newly crowned 81 year old patriarch of the family.

Indochine Cafe

For my father-in-law's 80th birthday he requested we as a family eat at Indochine Cafe in Wilmington, NC. Besides the fact that my mother-in-law insisted on paying for the meal, it was a great place to eat. The food was so excellent that I would go back any chance I get.

We tried many things, but the 3 I liked the best were the following listed from hottest spice-wise:

    1. red curry
    2. green curry
    3. yellow curry

The red curry was one of the hottest dishes I have put in my mouth and just kept getting hotter the more I ate. Finally my temples felt like they were increasing 1 degree in temperature every minute. Then the back of my neck started sweating. What a strange experience but the taste was so good. I also tried the green curry and it must have been the coconut sweetness that did not give it the same edge. It was also very hot but the hotness did not last. If you like coconut and hot food, then it is a perfect dish. The yellow curry was spicy with tumeric based spices and had a great flavor but was not hot at all.

The environment is so unique with Buddhist statues all around and lovely pottery as well. What a nice evening!